After the war, you couldn't be openly antisemitic. Or, at least, you had to camouflage your antisemitism. Then, around 1970, as the Boomers streamed into the labor market, the new tolerance became institutionalized. That was the beginning of the respite from history. /1 For three or four decades, the Jews inhabited this halcyon dream. It was unlike anything they had ever experienced in the diaspora. They were not simply tolerated but celebrated. The U.S. alliance w/the Jewish state seemed like a ratification of the new openness. /2

When I was in college and for many years after that, most of the smart, sophisticated people in my orbit were "of the left." Not everyone -- my closest friend in school wrote his economics thesis on why we should dismantle the Department of Education -- but most. /1 In the mid-aughts that shifted. There was a lot of anti-Bush hysteria and then there was the rah rah rah Obama nonsense and the smart people were eclipsed by the trendy people, who liked Obama because he was black and went to Harvard and was from a big city and had done coke. /2

Those who have slipped unthinkingly into the antisemitic chorus, echoing whatever libel Hamas churns out, might consider their objective. It is not simply elimination of the Jewish state but the Jews. It is a return to helplessness and fear, and eventually, total destruction.

https://twitter.com/nicolelampert/status/1961207086651428882

There are 16 million Jews in the world, and the world, these past 22 months, has shown itself to be increasingly intolerant of them. Europe is on track to becoming judenrein. America, and especially red America, is much better, but that’s always wobbly, contingent — uncertain.

This is what happens when you absorb, or internalize, millennia of hate, and you think, They have a point, and you repackage that hate in a self-serving way, and you tell yourself, It pains me that these other Jews are Jews, when you really mean: It pains me that I am Jewish.

https://twitter.com/okimstillhungry/status/1960887850901364795

The role Friedland is playing is that of the kapo — the Jew articulating and/or acting out the wishes, conscious or unconscious, of the gentile majority. This is literally the world’s oldest (or second oldest) profession.

Actually, what's grotesque is perpetuating an antisemitic famine libel.

Anyone who read the story c/o @Olivia_Reingold and @TanyaLukyanova_ knows it was about dispelling that libel -- showing how photos of children have been doctored and distributed in the service of a lie.

https://twitter.com/CrookedMedia/status/1958313273645846736

We should be crystal clear about what the guys at @CrookedMedia are up to: taking part in a medieval pile-on.

If they really cared about the people they purport to care about, they'd be laser-focused on destroying Hamas.

Last night, I heard Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter speak to a crowd under a rain-soaked tent on a farm on Martha's Vineyard. I was struck by his intelligence and moral clarity. He knew exactly what his country had to do. He was unlike almost any public official I've met. /1 There are several big take-aways. Among the most important is the centrality, in his view, of an emerging Jewish-Muslim consensus in the Middle East -- w/Israelis and reform-minded Muslims working together to mitigate food/water insecurity and increase economic opportunity. /2

I remember a graduate school friend who got mugged, and when this came up over drinks one night, someone -- I think she was in Anthropology -- said, "This is not about you. It's about one community taking back what is owed to it by another community." /1

https://twitter.com/Olivia_Reingold/status/1957440227611378156

It didn't really matter (to her, at least) what the facts were -- whether someone had done something wrong, or whether someone else had been wronged. What mattered was that both people involved were, in her mind, props in an historical narrative. They were playing a role. /2

Come now.

Iran started this in 1979, when it took 52 Americans hostage.

Over the years it financed terror across the Middle East and Europe.

Its goal was explicit: To bring an end to the West: pluralism, democracy, all that. /1

https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/1936587371480592555

In 2015, the Obama Administration, including @TVietor08, cut a deal with Iran premised on the assumption that Iran could be incentivized not to build a nuclear arsenal. If you ignored the previous three-and-a-half decades, it kind of made sense. /2

Note that this guy works for a media company mostly funded by the Qatari regime, which runs on the blood, sweat and tears of what are basically indentured servants from across the Middle East and south Asia. /1

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1930721246746202272

This is the same regime that until recently provided safe haven to the Hamas high command, who lived in five-star hotels while the people they were supposedly fighting for were dying in Gaza. /2

Oswald. It's always been Oswald.

This used to be easier for Americans to believe because there was a widespread faith in the institutions.

Also: We used to be less stupid, less prone to mythical thinking, not so easily coopted by hucksters and conspiracy theorists.

https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1902152285003690296

The facts of the case have not changed.

We have changed.

The conspiracy theorists and their many adherents believe they're just asking questions.

Really, they are betraying a profound alienation and ignorance, a malleability, a desire to believe that they lack agency.

This is a terrible mistake that endangers U.S. interests by encouraging Russian expansionism in the former Soviet space, and signals to Iran and China that we are not serious about defending the principles of freedom and democracy and self-determination.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1889722028120285217

The United States should not be sidestepping Ukraine. We should be arming it with advanced weapons to force Russia to retreat and discourage it from ever invading one of its neighbors again.

The thesis of The West Wing was that civic-minded, Ivy-educated liberals, given the chance, would do a brilliant job of running the world.

The problem is when the people in charge are not civic-minded and only superficially intelligent, outfitted with the correct lingo.../1

https://twitter.com/LemonLymancom/status/1877011205392404594

the correct opinions, the correct aesthetic. There is a tendency, among many on the left and center-left, to think these people are the people they claim to be, but they're not. They're simulacra. /2

What's happening in Georgia is a reminder of how wrong President-elect Trump, Tulsi Gabbard and, more broadly, the new right is w/r/t Russia. /1

https://twitter.com/mari_nikuradze/status/1871924419913994446

The widely held view in the America First camp is that the United States cornered Russia into invading Ukraine. That's Kremlin propaganda, and the demonstrators in Tbilisi are a reminder of as much. /2

Rogan has helped expand the discourse, making room for ideas and points of view that run afoul of the sclerotic and insular legacy media, but there's absolutely nothing legendary about this. /1

https://twitter.com/IanJaeger29/status/1862503618936463827

This seems like the kind of move that's meant to fire up an increasingly maga-esque audience, which doesn't want to consider the possibility that Zelensky is not, in fact, a con artist or villain siphoning U.S. tax dollars at the expense of global stability. /2

Last year I met the mother of Mark Swidan, an American wrongly imprisoned in China -- 12 years ago.

"It’s just me and my best friend (mom) left!" he once wrote in a letter his mother could barely bring herself to read.

Tonight, Mark Swidan comes home.

thefp.com/p/a-prisoner-o… For years, Swidan languished in prison. His fiancé left him. His body started to break down. His mother grew older, sicker, more desperate.

There is a blindness on the new right w/r/t Russia, which they insist on viewing sympathetically. That is their starting point, and it's divorced from much, if any, knowledge of history or culture. It leads to the most absurd cul de sac, in which victim becomes villain. /1

https://twitter.com/DrewPavlou/status/1860416404153131189

The most important thing to bear in mind about the Russian state is that it is basically a criminal enterprise. It has been that way since at least Ivan, who ruled Russia in the mid-16th century and, more than anyone else, shaped its political culture more. /2

Several friends have asked whether the Democrats’ warm reception of the parents of a Jewish hostage being held in Gaza suggests that claims of left-wing antisemitism are overblown. I don’t think so. /1 I think that what happened last night in the United Center was touching and powerful, and it indicates that most Americans, irrespective of their political bent, can empathize with a mother and father doing everything in their power to bring their son home — alive. /2